This sad FACE FRAME! documents the moment Ian found out Dirty PCBs hit Hacker News, Hack a Day, etc. Here’s the story behind our joke PCB site… A few months ago there were some comments in the forum about various PCB services making ‘crap’ $0.90 boards. Later we posted a picture of our own $0.20 […]
Category Archives: PCB Review
Review of Smart-Prototyping PCB service
SnAgCu has a detailed review of the Smart-Prototyping PCB service we covered previously. High magnification images are included to show just how the boards turned out. Via the contact form.
Prototyping your PCBs in Europe or in China?
To use European or Chinese based PCB prototyping services is the question Electronics Lab tries to answer. They order the same PCBs from an European and a Chinese PCB manufacturer, and compare the quality and price differences. Based on their review the quality is the same, while the Chinese board is more than 5 times […]
Soldering iron driver v1.5 PCBs are available at Seeed
Hardware hacking is more fun with open source, DIY tools. That’s why Arhi designed a completely open soldering station controller motherboard. And we designed a through hole version that is now available as a PCB only at Seeed for $7 The completed PCB is the heart of a soldering station, able to control several types […]
Poison via effect in manufacturing
From the comments on our earlier DIY BGA soldering teardown post, JesseJ points out the poison via effect that will also break the connection to the BGA. Image above is from the previous post, depicting the capillarity effect where a via sucks the ball of solder in, and prevents contact to the BGA. Just as a […]
PCB review Tuesday technical difficulties
Due to a problem encoding the screen capture the debut of PCB review Tuesday will have to wait. Thanks to everyone who submitted a PCB for comments, we’ll get them up ASAP. If you’d like someone to give your PCB a second look before you send it to the fab, or just want advise on […]
PCB review Tuesday videos coming
Starting next week we’re going to try a new weekly feature called PCB review Tuesday. In a five minute video we’ll look at a PCB and talk about what we would change before producing the board. PCB routing is an art. There’s lots of styles, and ours isn’t the right one or the best. Our […]